The invention relates to a method for determining an expected consumption value of a motor vehicle.
To determine the maximum possible travel distance of a motor vehicle, the remaining amount of energy—i.e. the amount of fuel stored in a motor vehicle with an internal combustion engine and the energy stored in the battery of an electric motor vehicle—is usually divided by the route-specific consumption of the motor vehicle. Since the fuel consumption of motor vehicles varies greatly depending on the driving situation, it is not very practical to rely solely on the actually measured consumption value. Therefore, average consumption values are typically used for the calculation.
To enable a particularly accurate range determination, it is known to use driving-situation-dependent consumption values for calculating the potential driving range. For this purpose, the driving situation of the motor vehicle can be classified according to criteria such as driving speed, driven road category or the like, wherein a respective consumption value is assigned to each of those driving situations.
To further improve the accuracy of the range determination, it is also useful to determine consumption values specific for each motor vehicle, since the consumption can also be different between motor vehicles of the same model and/or engine configuration. To obtain such consumption values, for example the consumption history of the motor vehicle, categorized according to driving situations, can be stored and used for future range predictions.
The problem hereby ensures that different amounts of data are present depending on the driving behavior and the usage profile of the driver of a particular motor vehicle available for different driving situations. When a motor vehicle is used mainly in city traffic, a sufficient amount of historical consumption data may not exist that would apply, for example, to driving situations associated with cross-country trips so as to allow a statistically significant range determination in such driving situations.